Director's Corner

With the Higgs boson safely bagged by the LHC and the TDR published the last months were eventful to say the least. Linear Collider Board chair Sachio Komamiya looks back at what happened, what was accomplished in 2013 and what still needs to be done to make the linear collider an operational project in Japan.

Around the World

New ILC cavity laboratory opens

by Gerrit Hörentrup (DESY)

One-stop (work)shopping for high-gradient cavities: in a new lab at DESY in Hamburg all inspection and treatment processes for cavities come together under one roof to make treatment faster and more reliable and prepare for serial production.

Around the World

CRISP, the "Cluster of Research Infrastructures for Synergies in Physics" is a European-funded project and one of its objectives is to upgrade and harmonise the SRF Accelerator Structures for ESS, ILC, LHC upgrade and the European XFEL. The activity supports an optimised surface treatment, the application of advanced test and preparation infrastructure as well as state-of-the-art diagnostics tools. Significant focus is laid on the knowledge transfer between ESS, CERN and DESY.

Image of the week

A picture says more than a thousand words, the old saying goes. But what about a number? A total of 2400 people signed the ILC Technical Design Report this year. They come from 392 institutes in 48 countries. While not yet in the realm of authors of an active experiment - the author number for recently published papers of the ATLAS collaboration, for example, is 2939 - the long list of names and institutes demonstrate both the past and present commitment to the project and an interest in future commitment.

In the News

ＩＬＣの国内候補地が北上山地に決まったことを受けて、誘致をしている宮城、岩手両県内の自治体関係者らが、仙台市泉区の東北インターナショナルスクールを視察した。(Following the announcement of Kitakami as a candidate site fro the ILC in Japan, officials from Iwate and Miyagi prefecture visited the Tohoku international school in Sendai.)

ＩＬＣの国内候補地に北上山地が決まったことを受け、岩手県一関市は庁内連絡会議を設置し、第１回会合を９日、市役所で開いた。(Following the announcement of Kitakami mountain as a national candidate site for the ILC, Ichinoseki-city established the conference of the executives to discuss the city’s role and share.)

It may take an even more powerful machine than the Large Hadron Collider to find out. Discussions are in the works about a next-generation accelerator, the International Linear Collider, which could make even more precise measurements about components of our universe we know little about.

“The idea that you could accelerate and collide a beam of particles and antiparticles in the same machine was completely different. ADA proved that this idea was correct and opened the possibility for a long line of particle and antiparticle colliders.”

Thanks to a CERN-based publishing initiative called the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, or SCOAP3, articles from 10 peer-reviewed journals will be available online; authors will retain their copyrights; and new licenses will enable wide re-use of content.